


another day, another door

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 3x07, Angst, Character Study, Episode Tag, First Kiss, M/M, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 23:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6170374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the doors of Flint's old life are closing on him, one by one. But then, perhaps Silver can open a new door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	another day, another door

**Author's Note:**

> Basically a reaction fic to the past few episodes, but especially 3x07. Title from Imagine Dragons - 'Roots'.

“You can’t see it yet, can you?” Miranda said. “You are not alone.”

And then he awoke, and he knew that he would not be seeing Miranda again unless he allowed death to come for him. All the doors of his old life were closing on him, one by one. There was no way to force them open while he still breathed.

The night before, when he had offered the distilled, sanitised version of his past life to Silver, this was what he had wanted: for just one person in the world to have some understanding of what he used to be. He could die, knowing that he had passed on some flaking ember of his past to someone else.

Sometimes, Flint could no longer believe that he had ever been anything other than what he was now. He could not believe that he had ever been loved, had ever felt his skin alight at another man’s touch.

Miranda used to be able to anchor him to those memories of his past. Now those memories—of kissing in a small room in London, of listening to a gentle voice read Marcus Aurelius to him—were nothing more than figments of his imagination, glimpses snatched through dreams. They were no more real than Miranda’s ghost had been.

But when he had briefly recounted his past to Silver, all those ghosts became real for a moment, became flesh and blood, became the searing heat of Thomas’ mouth upon his.

The moment had passed, and the only thing that was real was Silver, standing before him, insisting that nothing was inevitable. 

* * *

The knife was sharp against his skin. He could press down and cut and bleed. It would be proof that he still had a life to lose, even if he had little else. And he was willing to lose it.

But Silver had come and sat down next to him in the quiet night and told him that he would be bothered if Flint lost that life; that there was another way out. It was not that Flint had not considered that there might be another way. It was that Flint had not wanted to believe that the other way was viable. The solid weight of the knife in his hand was like a lullaby, its reassuring blade caressing his palm, whispering that this way was the easy way, the sure way.

Silver, though, believed in the other way, and when Silver spoke, Flint wanted to believe him.

Now Flint heard Miranda’s kind voice in his head. She had told him that he was not alone, and though he had resisted the idea, he wondered if she might perhaps be right.

The doors of his old life might be closed forever, but that wasn’t to say new ones couldn’t be opened. 

Flint let the knife clatter to the floor of the cage.

* * *

“How good it feels,” Silver said, looking directly at Flint, and Flint looked back at him in the dim lamplight. He thought of Thomas, and how Thomas had made him a better man by the love that they shared, and how far he’d fallen when that love had been ripped from him.

Flint had been hoping to offer his sympathy when he came to see Silver, but now he realised that Silver did not need his sympathy. Silver was—ruined. Flint felt a hollow sort of guilt at being responsible for it. But at the same time, he could not deny the other feeling that sparked in him, a shameful, joyous thrill. He could not make anyone a better person; he was not Thomas, and he did not have the sort of magic that truly good men possessed. But he was certainly capable of dragging men down with him as he fell.

And he had never realised how much he had wanted Silver to end up here with him.

And here they were, down in the darkness together. It slowly dawned on Flint that what he was feeling was desire, and it was crackling and wicked and terrible the way loving Thomas had never been, and Flint was very, very afraid of it.

Flint did not want to give in to it just yet. _Nothing is inevitable_ , Silver had said, but Flint lived a very different kind of life where everything felt like it was always hurtling uncontrollably towards something just out of sight. And this, Flint knew, was inevitable.

But not yet. Flint made himself look away. “It’s not easy, is it?” he said. _Especially how good it feels. That’s the hardest part._ “You should get a good night’s rest.”

He brushed his hand over Silver’s shoulder as he left the room.

Earlier, he had believed that he was glad that he had not been there to witness Silver killing Dufresne. Now, he finally admitted to himself that he rather wished he had been there, to see the blood on Silver’s face and the look in Silver’s eyes; to find himself there as if he had simply looked in a mirror.

* * *

The next morning, he stepped onto a pristine and empty beach and faced Woodes Rogers and heard him speak a name that Flint had not thought he would ever hear on the lips of another human being again. And Rogers spoke it once more, and twice more, and Flint grimaced and grit his teeth and bore it.

He had not been aware that Eleanor knew about all this; he had thought that he was the last person alive who knew, until he told Silver that night in the cage. Miranda must have informed Eleanor at some point, though when, Flint had no clue.

Unexpectedly, it felt like relief, to know that something he thought to be buried was in fact still floating around, information passed freely from one person to another.

He did not think that Miranda had told Eleanor about the whole truth, though. Flint _was_ the last and only person alive to know that. To know the depth of the connection that had existed between him and—

He opened his mouth and said the name himself: _Thomas Hamilton_. He tried to make it sound as if that name wasn’t a burden he had been bearing for years, but the weight of Thomas’ name fell out of him, less like words spoken and more like an exhalation, as natural as life itself. He thought of Miranda’s pale, bullet-marred face in death. He thought of Thomas, and how he did not know what Thomas looked like in death.

Rogers said that he was happy to play the villain if he had to. Flint tried not to sneer. Rogers knew nothing about playing the villain.

For Flint, it was no play. He was not an actor on a stage, donning his costume for a performance, only to shed it at the end of the night. There was only living, from one day to another, in stifling darkness, as if he were locked in a room and someone had snuffed out a lamp that he could not find the means to relume. The doors used to be open; he used to be able to see beyond into better-lit and airier rooms.

They were not open now, and he could not see.

He walked away from that beach, under the impossible expanse of open blue sky, and thought about much brighter days long since past, in a city filled with smoke.

* * *

When he got back aboard the ship, he called Silver to his cabin. He did not know why he did it until Silver was there, and then he knew: he knew it in Silver’s dark mass of wavy hair, in Silver’s clever eyes, in Silver’s tanned skin. 

“What did you and Rogers have to talk about?” Silver asked. 

“He tried to persuade me that he and I are the same,” Flint said.

“Are you?”

“Once, that might have been true,” Flint said. He took a steadying breath. “I told you. About how Peter Ashe and Miranda and her husband and I—we worked to build pardons for Nassau, once.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Rogers knows about that, so he thought that he was just finishing what I started,” Flint said. “But here’s what nobody knows.”

He glanced at Silver, and felt the heavy yearning in his stomach, roiling in such a way that he might have mistaken it for nausea, or fear. Perhaps it _was_ fear, but Flint had long acquired the habit of sailing his ship right into the middle of things that terrified him, and he was done walking away from this particular inevitability.

Silver’s eyes were expectant.

“Miranda’s husband and I loved each other,” Flint said, fiddling restlessly with some paper on his desk. He could not look at Silver anymore, and instead looked just past him at the wall. He had struggled with choosing the right words. He had wanted to say, _Miranda’s husband and I were fucking_ , but at the last moment he knew that those words did not honour the way he felt about Thomas. “England’s intolerance for that love was what drove me to Nassau, to this life.” 

“What happened to him?” Silver asked, and Flint had to give him credit; he barely seemed affected by news that Flint supposed most people would have found shocking.

“He died,” Flint said.

Silver huffed softly and said, “They always end up that way, don’t they?” He sounded amused, almost.

“Who?” Flint asked, though he had an inkling.

“The people you let in,” Silver said, after a pause that was just long enough for Flint to appreciate the weight of Silver’s words. Flint let himself look into Silver’s eyes again, and Silver smiled, slowly. “It looks like I’ll have to try very hard not to end up that way too.”

Silver reached out very deliberately and laid his hand upon Flint’s. They stared for a moment at each other, and Flint thought about how Silver’s smile terrified him more than a knife at his throat would. The two of them were standing on either side of Flint’s desk, and Flint found himself leaning forward, hungrily.

Then they were kissing, and Flint’s hand was tangled in Silver’s hair and there was the gentle scratch of Silver’s moustache and beard against his own, a sensation that he had never experienced before. The novelty of it stunned him and he thought that if it weren’t for Silver’s warm mouth upon his, he might have started to cry. He had spent so long treasuring every little scrap of pleasure that he could recall from his time with Thomas that he had not thought he would ever gain anything new, anything that wasn’t worn thin and faded.

Flint broke the kiss so he could swing his body over the desk. He sat down on the edge of the desk and pulled Silver down onto his lap and pressed their bodies ever closer as they kissed and kissed. 

He was tired of ghosts and a long-lost love that still choked him to think of it. Silver didn’t promise light and salvation; he knew that much. But Silver was opening a door inside him, wider every moment. Sometimes, the door looked like it might lead infinitely onwards into ever darker rooms, and sometimes, Flint was terrified of what they might become, together.

But last night, Silver had said, _How good it feels_. And Flint had to agree. He was terrified, and he was delighted; it was a sickeningly good feeling, this fear, this desire, seething inside him. He clutched at Silver’s waist and rolled his hips into Silver’s and they fell against each other, breathing hard and grinning, biting at skin, pulling at hair.

The door was wide enough to step through.

Who knew what was on the other side; Flint was looking forward to finding out.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I've written and posted since 2012, so forgive me if I'm a bit rusty! All comments are really appreciated! <3 You can find me on [tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to chat about Silver/Flint or anything else Black Sails.


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